Undivided Heavens

In an innovative cultural history across the Iron Curtain, this book explores how a divided nation used the cosmos – as both a technological reality and a field of imagination – to navigate the challenges of the Cold War and compete for the future. Smithsonian curator Colleen Anderson transforms the history of the Space Age by demonstrating that Germans were not just observers of the US-Soviet rivalry, but active participants who used spaceflight to redefine their place in the world.

Connecting the technical and political history of space programs with space imaginations in popular culture, Anderson uncovers unexpected commonalities between two states otherwise opposed. Through vivid stories of street astronomers building telescopes from wartime rubble, the West German cult TV hit Space Patrol, and East German youth "training" for missions at the socialist equivalent of Space Camp, this book demonstrates how the unbounded cosmos offered a site for political and cultural maneuvering – and a canvas for imagining alternative futures – that was often impossible on Earth. From the 1978 mission of the first German in orbit to the international laboratory of Spacelab, Anderson reveals that for a divided people, technological dreams were not mere fantasies; they were essential tools for confronting a burdened past and forging a new future. Contributing to spaceflight history, Cold War scholarship, and German studies, this book speaks to the many ways technological dreams become instruments for negotiating memory, ideology, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.